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Category Archives: News

After disappearing faster than a monkey can peel a banana, I’m back with another update on things.
Note that if you are new to this place, this is where I update about projects I do and other school related things, so you might not always get every reference I make to projects and people, I tend to disappear for a long time and then things have changed so much I have to update a lot of the pages, I’m working on it!

MAV Warfare has been ‘cancelled’, or more accurate, cannibalized together with some other projects for a new game. The main reason for this is that in the beginning me and Kjeld just started to work on it without a clear idea on how to structure it, and in the end the code got so interconnected that one thing broke another and it practically required us to start from scratch to get it working again. But who knows, maybe we’ll start it up again after a while, since I still like the idea. And it’s not like we haven’t learned from this, we have learned a lot about multiplayer, how variables are synced, gamemodes, scoreboards, radar etc.

M-Sat: Just after we made the post about us working on it, a very busy time at school started so it quickly became very quiet around it. School ‘draining the intent to program’ so to speak. The problem is now that a lot of the more ‘common’ mods have moved to newer versions of Minecraft, while we are still on 1.6.4. The idea is that we patch it up once we have some time, so its playable on that version, and put it online to see what the reactions to our idea are. If positive we will continue to work on it, for that version only though, porting will take too much time. All three of us still like the idea, and in fact we have expanded it beyond the original scope, just to look around in the code to see what we could do. Even if the feedback is negative and we won’t continue to work on it, it was a lot (and I mean a lot!) of fun, getting the weirdest bugs and trying to come up with ideas for multi-block structures.

MAV Warfare and several school projects led to the creation of MAR (I’m beginning to think that I have something with M’s and project names…), we structured it, and for the past few months we have made a lot of progress! We have a roadmap and documents detailing what goes into the game. The thing we lack though is time, so progress is being made, just slowly. I’m updating the page for it soon! It is a lot of fun since we have to think of things that we haven’t thought of before, servers, sending character data to clients, balancing server CPU vs. networking load, cheating and a few other things.

With my internship ‘finished’ and school kicking off again, it is time I come crawling out from under a rock 😉

School things:
Project Stella Incognita, extend an game-engine (Irrlicht) with 4 teams of 4 people, and per team make a game with that extended engine featuring your extension. Sounds complicated, and it probably will be! 16 People working together in one GIT repo with almost no experience in C++ and GIT, yay!

Advanced Physics, as the name says, its a continuation of the ‘basic’ 3D math courses we had, with more focus on the physics side of things. For assignments we have to do things with the cyclone physics engine, which was a royal pain to set up…
One of the lessons was about shaders, how they work and the cool things you can do with them. Check out http://shadertoy.com/ for example! :O

Persistent Storage, SQL and databases, database table relationships and how to set them up. Quite tricky assignments, a lot more complicated for someone who only made simple SQL querys. Especially involving subquerys and recursion!

Only 2 courses, and 1 project, lots of free time? Nope. It might sound like I’m blowing it out of proportions but they give you enough work to think about 😉

Projects:

MAV Warfrare has had very little attention, small features introducing new bugs (for example chat is no longer working) and not enough time are the main causes for this.

Time was spent however into M-Sat!
About 2 years ago me and Kjeld were messing around in Minecraft, and made a mod, it was just a few items and a block which had an GUI. Nothing functional apart from that.
About 4 months ago I thought, why not try and port it over to 1.6.4. We got back together to fix some of the errors, and figuring out how things worked in the new version.
One thing led to another, a design document was made, and in our free time we were messing around, trying to implement our features. And here we are, M-Sat!

It stands for Multipurpose Satellites, or Minecraft Satellites if you want. We’re not disclosing a lot, but here are a few screenshots, showing from where we started to what it is currently:

In this post I’ll talk about what I did for school and a few project updates, progress has been made :D.

The project entertainment game (see previous post) has been completed, and you can see some of the screenshots at the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TwistedMindsGame
Actual gameplay you ask? Why not play it yourself! Its up on Dropbox <LINK> Just run the exe and you’re set!

One of the courses we had was 3D modeling, in order to learn/appreciate 😉 (for us programmers) the design side of games.
We had three exercises, make a house, a rough terrain vehicle, and a face (based on your own)
Results….well its not exactly perfect, but for someone who rarely models…

The face (or at least something that resembles one)

A tachikoma (the vehicle)

The house (based on Delta Flyer)

Another course we had was called Algorithms and Datastructures in Games, where we were introduced to things like A* and Dijkstra’s algorithm. Me and the partner I had to do the practicum with actually managed to confuse the teacher. Our A* algorithm behaved like it should, but in a few levels it went a little bit differently then what was supposed to be. The code was fine, what could it be? Our program then got discussed with the entire course team, but no answer was found! Magic! 😀
For those interested in the code and the document we created, here is a link to the NetBeans project: <LINK>

Currently at school we are busy with C++ (a course), AI (another course) and C++ in Android (a project) for which details can’t be revealed just yet.

And now, the projects….

The intro for Starbase United has been written, but the actual production will take A)More time then we have available and B)Money…
We are considering making a trailer and putting it up for Kickstarter.

MAV Warfare, (the game me and http://kjeld21.wordpress.com/ are working on from time to time)
We have basic multiplayer and a simple gamemode ready, and are currently working on the TDM gamemode.

The Klingon translator has got a few letters added to its vocabulary.

Oolas machinima,
We ran into some trouble, but with LOTRO becoming 6 years old the things holding us back seem to have disappeared. Filming will begin in the May holliday!

The next tutorial is, like many other projects, put on the backburner due to school (note that I started writing it 170 days ago -.- ).

Some secret is going on in the background, I don’t quite get it but the other project members are quite excited, its got something to do about the Oculus Rift headset…. Me want! 😀

With Project Entertainment Game I was added to team Twisted Minds, creating a horror/puzzle game based on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. We are almost at the end of the second SCRUM sprint (see image in previous post) and things come along nicely. Lots of interesting features have been made with Unity! I won’t talk much about this since we are supposed to be professional about this. Me talking about having made a bjoetiful (:P) chair creates an expectation with the audience, if later is decided that it isnt used ingame, then not only I am sad, but also the audience.

Because of this project and University in general I haven’t been able to make much progress in….well… all projects available.

There is however something in the making, yes another project 😛 , but this WILL be done. I promise! It’s called Breen in Amsterdam. I’m going to toy around with Blender’s Track Match Blend DVD tutorial. Its an introduction to VFX (visual effects)

In the tutorial, that will be part of this project, I’ll talk about de-compiling the model into Blender (instead of XSI), animate it by hand or Kinect, and then apply animations to VFX scenes.

A great example what can be made with blender + VFX is this:

Now about the idea, think this:

plus

plus

Of course filming in the middle of A’Dam is going to be one hell of a job, especially to get people to cooperate.. But I’ll worry about that once I get the Blender DVD in my head 😉

PEG, translated in Dutch is a bad spelling version of pech, meaning bad luck. Lucky for us PEG is an acronym for Project Entertainment Game.

A bit weird name since games tend to be entertaining by themselves, no need to put it in the title again! But who am I to criticize project names 😛

The idea of this project is that tomorrow everyone pitches his/her (ultimate) game idea. I already got a few ideas lying around collecting dust but…. Idea 1: Impossible with current level of technology (in case you have a working holodeck please contact me 😉 ) Idea 2: Kind of want to keep this for myself. But the basic idea is turning Legendary Hatters into a game.
So I’m left with the next thing on my list, idea 3. Which is Dhovakiin!
Thats right, the game I worked on for a few days but dropped due to lack of programming knowledge!

Ill talk about the game in a minute. What happens after the pitch is that the ‘jury’ selects half of all the ideas, pairs two people together, and they are the selection jury for their idea/team! After that the game needs to be developed in half a year, and in 4 development ‘sprints’. Somewhere in between a game publisher comes in the picture. So if its good enough (a sellable game!) it might actually get out in the world!

I just hope for the best with my idea. Here it is:

Take the shout words from Skyrim, combine it with the spell casting system from Magicka, and put it in an adventure platformer.

The level has no pre-defined way to solve, the player has to use his creativity to get to the end.

There are as you can see in the (pre-alpha) screenshots I made (in my previous year) 7 base words, they define the base action of the shout. Other words change the effect, or potency.

As far as I know there is no big story, apart from a very basic idea that a Dhovakiin in 2012 fights for freedom from the evil villains which have taken the workers at Gars Incorporated (no, not Mars! :P) hostage. And for some reason our protagonist likes a Gars every now and then.

So humour and creativity saving the world and giving us back some candy bars 😛

The next schoolyear is about to begin and I start with my second year of game development. But that doesn’t mean we go silent again. There are a couple of things that we are working on:

Video of the Kinect tutorial (Same theory. Different animation. Will take some time to make but is easier to understand ).
Multiple Minecraft shows (Machinima and Redstone Lab).
LOTRO show (see previous posts).
Minecraft PvP map.
And I will put out some posts about my schoolwork when available.

Men, Hobbits, Dwarves and Elves of Middle Earth, thank you for tuning your view crystals to this channel. We are here to bring you the latest news from throughout Eriador and beyond! My name is <Bleep>ed out cause I don’t know if the white council (read: Turbine 😉 ) likes what I am doing. Now, to the news!

This is one of the intro’s I came up with for Oolas of Lindon (as you might have guessed that is his name 😛 ) The news articles themselves are a bit more challenging to make, since I don’t want to ‘report’ quests, but since Eriador is big enough I’m sure I can stick to Tolkien’s lore. Ok view crystals are a bit weird, and yes its a TV kind of thing, but otherwise it wouldn’t be for Middle Earth now would it? 😛

A few articles have been written, and will be from our reporter X (read: another character of mine 😉 ) while Oolas is the host of the show. More details soon! In the mean time, if you want to help by playing reporter, or write a story, feel free to comment! I’m on Vilya.

Legal thingy: This is just a fan series in production, no copyright infringement intended. This work will be non-commercial, and maybe a small community event within the Vilya server.